Saturday, January 14, 2017

Can Indigenous Spirituality Save the Planet, Save Us All?

The agitated
middle-aged Indigenous man wasn’t angry, but he was loud.

Very loud.

He was also in the
middle of Smith St. in downtown Winnipeg, shouting as he walked among the cars
stopped at a stoplight, bemoaning the fate of Indigenous people in Canada
today.

“Look what Canada did
to us!” he yelled. “Look at what they stole!”

When the light
changed, and traffic started to move, he left the street. He wandered over to
the sidewalk where I was standing, waiting for my ride home.

“We had so much land
before the Europeans came,” he shouted at me. “Now look at us, squeezed into
tiny reservations.”

I introduced myself,
and he quieted down. I asked his name. George, he said. His name was George.

“The land,” he said.
“They stole our land. Just think if we still had that land, and you paid taxes
to live on it!”

And with that he
gestured broadly around him, pointing at the office towers and other buildings
in downtown Winnipeg.

I told George I agreed
with him—a great injustice had been done to Indigenous people in Canada. Together
we agreed it was time to renew and restore our relationship as Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Canadians, and also to make peace with the land—to restore our
relationship with the earth. But how?

Before we came up with
any answers, my ride arrived. George thanked me for the conversation. “You’re
the first person to listen to me,” he said as I shook his hand goodbye.

It’s been four months
since that chance encounter, but it has stayed with me.

Across North America,
Indigenous people like George are crying out—about the state of the land, the
air and the water, about missing and murdered women, about poverty, poor
housing on reserves, and about the tragedy of residential schools.

Are we listening?

I know I am
trying. I especially tried hard to listen in December, when thousands of
Indigenous people and others gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux
reservation in North Dakota.

For months, the
Standing Rock Sioux protested the construction of a pipeline across
their territory, saying it would endanger their source of water.

For a long time, it
appeared that nobody was listening. But then something amazing happened: The
U.S. government ordered an environmental impact review, and agreed to consider
alternate routes for the pipeline.

As I listened to
reports about the protest, the thing that struck me was how deeply spiritual it
was. The protest camp was filled with prayer: communal prayers in the morning and evening and at
mealtimes, and prayers in vigils and songs.

As Standing Rock tribal
councilman Dana Yellow Fat said: “We began this with prayer, and we look
at this whole movement as a ceremony. It began with prayers before we left, and
in the end, it will close with prayers . . . we’re fighting the pipeline with
prayer.”

Added Pua Case, an
Indigenous woman from Hawaii who was part of the protest: “Standing Rock is
a prayer camp. It’s where prayers are done.”

For Caro Gonzales,
also at the camp, spirituality at Standing Rock wasn’t “a side
effect” at the protest, but a “crucial driving force” behind the activism.

Jack Jenkins, a
reporter who visited the camp, noticed this, too. Standing Rock, he wrote, gave witness to “an emerging Indigenous
spiritual movement that is sweeping North America.”

In
an article titled “The growing indigenous spiritual movement that could save
the planet,” he added that spirituality “is a core mobilizing and stabilizing force” for the protest.

Maybe he’s right.
Maybe movements led by Indigenous people like at Standing Rock can
help save the planet. Just as Christian revivals, called “awakenings,” swept parts of North
America in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, maybe Indigenous-led or inspired protests in
Canada and the U.S. can bring their own form of revival today.

Maybe they can help us
all, no matter what faith we belong to, find new ways to be restored to each
other, to the planet, and to God.

Maybe—but only if we
listen.From the Jan. 14, 2016 Winnipeg Free Press